Traditional methods of negotiating involve face-to-face negotiation, or exchanges of negotiation information through meetings, telephone calls, e-mail, faxes or other media means. In each step of the negotiation process, human involvement is indispensable. Depending on how complicated the negotiation terms and the conditions are, negotiating a business deal may be time and effort consuming. For example, during a negotiation, one party typically makes an offer and then waits for the other party to either accept or reject the offer or make a counter offer. This process may go on for each of the details that are to be agreed upon before a contract is formed. By the time all the revisions are completed, the negotiation may take hours, days or even years to close a deal. In today's quickly-evolving e-commerce world, such time-frames may be unrealistically slow and may adversely affect business transactions. Moreover, it is desirable to be able to create spontaneous business deals by reducing human involvement in the negotiation process as much as possible.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,148,290 to Dan et al., entitled “Service Contract for Managing Service Systems,” which is incorporated herein by reference, has defined the concept of a electronic business-to-business (“B-B”) service contract that formally specifies the rules of engagement between the parties to the contract, and enforces the contract during actual long-running interaction. The contract may be defined jointly by the parties to the agreement. The same contract may be used for multiple instances of interaction. However, the contract remains static across the interaction instances.
An example of the prior art is illustrated in FIG. 1 (PRIOR ART), which shows the usage of a service contract or a Trading Partner Agreement (TPA) between two companies. Box 10 represents Business1 that has previously agreed with Business2 20 on certain trading conditions and terms specified in a TPA 30. Whenever a business transaction 40 occurs between Business1 10 and Business2 20, there will be a check 50 against service contract 30 to make sure the transaction 40 is valid and no condition and terms in TPA 30 have been violated.
The content of a TPA 30 may include the following components: the general information, the roles and participants, the delivery channels, the transport protocol, the document exchange protocol (hereinafter “docexchange protocol”) and the business protocol. The general information about the TPA provides the TPA name, its type and its version. The roles and the participants section specifies the various roles and participants along with the contact information of the business partners, and it also includes the valid duration of the contract, the number of times the contract may be used and how often it may be invoked. The delivery channels define how messages from one party's business protocol are moved to the other party's business protocol. The transport protocol defines the communication protocol, encoding and transport security information. The docexchange protocol provides information that party must agree on regarding exchange of documents between them, and it also includes message security definition. The business protocol defines the business interfaces that support the business application.
The present invention is motivated by the need to be able to negotiate automatically and dynamically between businesses. As the Internet expands, more and more companies are trying to move their business online and hoping to gain substantial business advantage because the Internet operates in a 24/7 schedule, i.e., 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Such full-time availability to potential customers is generally too costly for a traditional storefront business to keep. To do business online, it is advantageous for a company to be able to negotiate with its clients automatically and dynamically. The online shopping and the online auctioning have touched on some simpler form of automated negotiation, i.e., by collecting information from their clients via various HTML forms, whereby the output is not necessarily an electronic document/contract. Typically, for example, a business presents a template or form which a customer or client fills out and submits back to the on-line business. Negotiating a more complicated business deal, however, automatically involves exchanges of offers and counter offers between both negotiation parties or their negotiation servers until all the terms and conditions are agreed upon. Known methods of conducting negotiations do not handle complex exchanges, nor do they result in an electronic document for configuring subsequent negotiations between the parties. Furthermore, complex business deals frequently involve multiple parties as well as multiple negotiation interactions.
Therefore, there is a need for a method of negotiating dynamically and automatically via a communication network. There is also a need for a method for automated and/or dynamic negotiation of the terms of a contract. Additionally there is a need for an automated negotiation process between a plurality of parties wherein the contract negotiation process is delegated to a third party.